Death by Cliff Plunge, With a Push From Twitter

By MONICA CORCORAN

Published: July 12, 2009

VIRUSES may spread quickly on the Internet, but hoaxes can be pretty contagious, too. In the same week that Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died, the Web became a hotbed of made-up death reports about various celebrities.

Jeff Goldblum was the first to go. A headline on Google News read, ''Jeff Goldblum Has Died, Falls to Death on Set!'' Details were murky, but just specific enough to sound plausible. The story went that Mr. Goldblum, 56, had plummeted off the 60-foot Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand while filming a movie.

What started out as a prank soon took on a life of its own. Twitter users retweeted the item, and the community became an echo chamber. Facebook members chimed in.

By the week's end, the celebrity death toll had turned into a conga line. Harrison Ford had gone down in a capsized yacht in St-Tropez; George Clooney's private plane had nose-dived somewhere in Colorado. Miley Cyrus? Car accident. Natalie Portman? That tricky cliff in New Zealand. Ellen DeGeneres, Britney Spears and the comedian Louie Anderson were allegedly R.I.P., too.

''We got a phone call from a friend who read it on Facebook, that's how we found out,'' said Mr. Clooney's publicist, Stan Rosenfield, who also received calls from news outlets seeking confirmation. Instead of issuing a news release, Mr. Rosenfield contacted TMZ, a celebrity news and gossip site, which posted a story that dispelled the rumor and shook a finger at the mongers.

As for Mr. Clooney himself, ''George quoted Mark Twain and said his death had been 'greatly exaggerated,' '' Mr. Rosenfield said.

Twitter may have been the messenger, but most of the rumors did not originate there. The hoax trifecta of Mr. Goldblum, Mr. Ford and Mr. Clooney started at a prank Web site called Fakeawish.com, which offers visitors a template to generate outlandish stories about the actor or actress of their choice. Think of it as macabre Mad Libs for the crowdsourcing era.

It works like this: a user enters a celebrity's name and is given a list of fake news stories to choose from -- the celebrity can die by plane, yacht or cliff, or be hospitalized after a traffic altercation. The user must choose whether the victim is male or female.

From there, the prankster is directed to a site called Global Associated News, where a vaguely plausible story appears, ready to be e-mailed, linked to and instant-messaged. A disclaimer at the bottom of the page reveals that the content is ''100% fabricated.''

The Borat of this particular Web site is Rich Hoover, a 37-year-old Atlanta resident who parlayed his information-technology expertise into a modest empire of 20 Web sites, including Global Associated News and a YouTube-style pornography site. He is proud to say that he makes money off of his sites (through advertising) and generates all the death hoax stories himself.

''I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some twisted sense of satisfaction or accomplishment,'' said Mr. Hoover, who designed the site in 1998 to amuse his co-workers and refined it in 2002 to concentrate on celebrities. The recent popularity is a result of all the traffic driven to his site by Twitter feeds. ''In a small way, you have to pinch yourself and think, 'Wow! I caused all this,' '' he said.

Mr. Hoover was also behind the 2006 hoax that had Tom Hanks careering off the Kauri Cliffs. Ditto for Tom Cruise, whom Mr. Hoover had plunging to his death in 2008.

Why New Zealand? ''I'm an avid golfer, and I saw a segment on New Zealand when I was watching the PGA Tour -- it looked beautiful,'' Mr. Hoover said, adding that he mostly uses international locations because they take longer to disprove. He said the only cease-and-desist letter he has received since 2002 was sent by a lawyer for Michael Vick, the football star (whose problems with dog-fighting may have pushed this concern to the back burner).

Clearly, pumping up fake stories about famous people has been a popular and even lucrative pastime for ages. (Supermarket tabloids, anyone?) These days, the same naughty human instincts are still there -- you know, the ones that have prompted generations of teenagers to make prank phone calls -- and technology has moved things forward.

''Within Internet memes, it's natural for people to build on top of what is already happening,'' said Tim Hwang, a research associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

Twitter, for instance, already has credibility as a news site, thanks to its users' real-time coverage of the recent violence in Iran, the shooting rampage in Mumbai last year and the US Airways plane that landed in the Hudson River. That type of citizen journalism helped legitimize Twitter as a place people turn for the freshest developments.

TMZ is also known as being nimble. After it beat the print and broadcast news outlets in reporting Michael Jackson's death, a flurry of Twitter posts followed. Harvey Levin, TMZ's editor in chief, said he receives celebrity death tips all the time. ''But we fact-check everything,'' he said. ''We have legal and research departments. It's rigorous.''